It's okay to shoot Nazis in games, because they're not nice. So it was a novelty to find ourselves in the boots of one of them in this tank-based WWII wargame, which has you fighting on the dark side, driving around in a giant metal box with a gun on the front blasting holes in virtual representations of your grandad. Who cares for morals - we never liked grandad much anyway, so we were looking forward to this.

You'd expect a tank game to be chaotic and full of destruction. Unfortunately, every aspect of Panzer Elite Action comes across as soulless and bland. The gun on your tank seems surprisingly weedy - firing it isn't as satisfying as it should be, and the yellow flash of the explosions lacks impact. Most buildings can be smashed and crushed, but again, the boyishly exciting prospect of this is let down by a disappointing single frame of animation that makes structures instantly turn into a pile of rubble the moment your tank grazes them.

Being strapped into a ten-ton armoured vehicle means you just don't take any care in what you're doing. There's no strafing, ducking, taking cover or any of the things that require any skill to succeed in shooters - your tank's just too slow for the usual tactics to apply. The only way to avoid dying is to kill the enemy before they kill you.

Slow is the operative word - the first few of the 18 missions are bland-looking open fields with hardly any enemies. Things pick up a bit in later levels, war-torn urban environments with more soldiers and tanks to blast, and planes flying overhead to add that typical wartime atmosphere. But the missions aren't particularly original, being little more than waypoint-following trigger-finger workouts. Follow the arrow, shoot some stuff, follow the arrow again, shoot more stuff.

That's if you can get to grips with the cannon on your tank, which moves far slower than your actual crosshairs. Your gun's hardly ever pointing in the same direction you're looking, forcing you to stop and take careful aim every time. Realistic, maybe, but it destroys what little pace there is in this lumbering title. Live and System Link games can be more fun, with up to 16 human-controlled tanks all trying to blast each other to bits. But with such large, slow-moving targets, it's more of a clumsy scuffle than a tactical test of skill.

Panzer Elite Action is reasonably playable. But that's all it is - acceptable, but never excellent. It's the only tank-based game on Xbox, and with a dose of the intense mayhem of, say, Call of Duty 2: Big Red One, it could have been ace. As it stands, the 'action' here is anything but elite.

1. Drive a large tank into enemy-filled areas and blast the crap out of everything! That's always fun to do.
2. Huge levels sprawl out for miles to the horizon, with little to no pop-up or frame-rate issues.

1. It takes a while to pick up the pace, with early levels feeling particularly empty and fun-free.
2. The tanks lack that powerful, meaty feel you'd expect from a 10-ton rolling gun. A big disappointment.
3. Large, empty rural areas and single-frame destruction animations on buildings leave a lot to be desired on the visual side.

Panzer Elite Action is a fairly solid tank-based shooter that's sadly lacking any impact, thrill or originality.